Tag: work

Work is an art

In order to do this, Stop Planning! Yes a corporate consultant saying stop planning. Planning processes are dull, uncreative, boring (here we go again).pla I mean Board Room activity. It lacks life. You design your home, do not plan it. Mental creation is a function of design and not planning.

Planning

Planning is out and as Tom Peters would say, Design sells. Taking the same principle a little further, Navitus recommends not planning a future but designing it.

Next time you are ‘planning’ at work remember if you plan, you are about to recreate disgustingly outdated ideas. Instead sit to design. Play music, remove your ties and design future with passion of a sports person, the vision of Michelangelo, inquisitiveness of a 15 month old, determination of a boxer and speed of a cheetah.

Once the designing is done you are ready to put it into action. This is critical. If your designing process is right, you are inspired and ready to be inspired. It is simple! Miandad (a legendary Pakistani cricketer) gave us the reverse sweep.

These are initiatives that are a result of commitment to work. You may call it unconventional, creative or artistic, the fact is it is a result of sheer love of what one does.

When you are done on the stage (workplace), you are performing. Perform like no one has ever performed. Out do your own previous performance. Surprise yourself. It will be the last day you worked!

Last words

Another thought provoking quote at the end: Work joyfully & peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts will inevitably bring about right results. James Allen, 1864-1912, British-born American Essayist, Author of ”As a Man Thinketh’

Don’t work today. Design your future! Your last working day was yesterday and yes it is all a state of mind…

Quotes

Confucius said that the day you enjoy your work, would be the last day you ever worked. Another quotation you may say. However, quotes are mind triggers designed to set an attitude, a mindset, and a culture. In simple words, using non corporate lingo, as a way of life. We use them as inspiration for self and others.

The above was just a quote until recent times. This quote coupled with various experiences in the recent past led to a concept that inspired to write what you are about to read below.

This concept will only make sense to you if you are willing to accept what is being said at face value. There is always an argument that you are different and that your ‘work’ cannot be made fun. If this is the mindset, guess what? You are right. Whether you think you can or cannot? In either case you are 100% right.

Work is an art

Work is actually an art. It requires you to use the science but display it like art. Your work is a piece of art because no one else has the brush but you. You are given a blank sheet to paint – your job description and responsibilities. How you paint, is purely in your hands.

Now let’s take you to any corporate Dude working in a company. Day in/day out, doing the same stuff. Fun is dying out. The first month excitement is out. Gone are the days when s/he used to be thrilled with that first business booked, the first promotion, the first 100% quality achievement and many other firsts.

Life has become a drag. It does not offer any more ‘firsts’ the way it used to. So big deal. Think of it this way. Today is the First day of the rest of your life. LIVE IT, PAINT IT!

I recently read that a routine life leads to a rut and the only difference between a rut and a grave, is the depth. Bring back life in your work by treating it as an art.

According to the dictionary, “Continuing professional development is the means by which members of professional associations maintain, improve and broaden their knowledge and skills and develop the personal qualities required in their professional lives.” Continuing professional development ensures that professionals keep developing their knowledge and skills, as well as improve their competence.

One can undertake a continuing professional development program through the following modes: home-based learning with the use of audio, video or multi-media resources and other distance-learning material; action-based learning or studying problem solution methods through workplace experience; supervised research; and conferences, seminars, workshops or other technical and professional events and meetings.

Continuing professional development accentuates a person’s education, development and effective professional performance.

In the US, professional organizations are also making continuing education mandatory, either as a requirement of membership renewal or licensing retention. Government organizations, professional bodies, employment organizations, individual employees and professional development providers are increasingly stressing continuing professional development programs.

A continuing professional development program requires systematic, ongoing, and self-directed learning that would ensure continued competence and an indisputable professional responsibility.

These programs offer courses that can provide the flexibility of a part-time study together with world-class postgraduate education and professional development. A professional can develop his skills through a variety of workshops, seminars, short courses, certificates, diplomas and master’s degrees as well as online courses across a wide range of disciplines. You can also study for short non-accredited specialist courses, which gives a person opportunity to be abreast with the latest changes in his profession.

Continuing professional development is important for the development of one’s career and can be used by organizations and individuals to investigate how learning can be best applied to support organizational objectives and sustain a competitive advantage.

When IBM’s programmers tried to run MS DOS on their prototype IBM PCs, they could hardly believe how buggy it was. By one count Microsoft had left at least 300 bugs in the software, and IBM eventually chose to rewrite the entire program. But Gates delivered on time, which kept the entire IBM PC project on schedule. The new IBM PC made its debut in August 1981, accompanied by a massive computer industry had never seen.

It took only a few years for Big Blue’s new desktop machines to take over the entire PC market. By 1983, two out of every three new home computers were made by IBM and were running the MS DOS operating system.

When Kildall got his first look at the IBM PC, he was enraged. He felt that MS DOS was nothing more than a crude clone of CP/M and that Gates stabbed him in the back. But he never sue IBM and Microsoft, partly because software copyrights were a hazy area of the law, but also he was so confident of CP/M-86’s superiority.

Once that CP/M-86 was ready for release in early 1982, Kildall was certain that most computer users would switch over from MS DOS. That’s not what happened. CP/M-86 did prove to be a better and more reliable operating system, but it was also more expensive.

Then IBM cautioned PC buyers that it would only offer technical support for computers running MS DOS. In no time at all, Microsoft displaced Digital Research as maker of the industry standard in operating systems. Software companies responded to IBM’s growing market dominance by pouring their resources into new applications for subsequent revisions of MS DOS. They also stopped bothering to upgrade their existing CP/M-compatible products.

Once they got pass the hurdle, Kildall was cold to IBM’s insistence that Digital Research negotiate a flat licensing fee for CP/M and forgo Digital Research’s usual per unit royalty rate. It didn’t help matters that Kildall was generally disapproving of IBM because so many IBM products struck him as slow, unimaginative and clumsily designed.

But the biggest stumbling block preventing a deal was Kildall’s timing, or rather, his utter disregard for timing. IBM planned to build its personal computer around a new, faster Intel Chip called the 8086, but CP/M would need an upgrade in order to run on it.

Kildall already had such an upgrade in the works, called CP/M-86. But Kildall either wouldn’t guarantee to Sams that it would be delivered enough to meet IBM’s development deadlines.

Sams tried to explain that IBM needed a schedule and a commitment by October 1980, but Kildall resisted. Perhaps Kildall assumed that IBM would bend to his schedule, since it appeared that IBM needed him and CP/M’s 90% market share more than he needed IBM.

But what Sams gathered from Kildall’s attitude was that Kildall would never be a reliable partner and that the IBM PC project needed an alternative plan for an operating system.

Not long after, he stopped returning Kildall’s calls. Kildall’s fate was sealed forever as “the man who could have been Bill Gates.”

By giving up on Kildall and CP/M, Sams put himself in a tight spot. But Sams also knew that Gates, more than anyone, would be highly motivated to help him find a way out. During the time that Kildall was giving Sams a runaround over royalties and deadlines, Gates was back in Seattle bending over backward to accommodate IBM’s development schedule.

He had put almost Microsoft’s personnel to work on the IBM effort, shoving other projects to the side. Now Gates needed IBM PC project to succeed, if only out of a sense of survival of Microsoft.